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For more information on these science news and feature story tips, please contact the public information officer at the end of each item at (703) 292-8070. Editor: Peter West Contents of this News Tip:
Habitat Fragmentation Can Amplify Ecological Stresses More Than Previously ThoughtThe fragmenting of habitats worldwide may be more devastating than scientists thought. Fragments are widely considered to be inferior to intact habitats because they are more likely to lose species. But new research shows that fragments are also more vulnerable to hunting, fires, drought and other kinds of ecological stress. "Such negative synergisms potentially could be one of the most important, and least understood, aspects of the modern environmental crisis," according to William Laurance of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Balboa, Panama. Laurance and his colleagues published a five-paper special section on habitat fragmentation in the December issue of the journal Conservation Biology. His work was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Laurance notes, for example, that fragmentation of the Amazon forest makes it more susceptible to damage from droughts caused by the phenomenon known as El Niņo. During the 1997 droughts, trees near fragment edges were 50 percent more likely to die than trees in the interior. These fragments are already particularly vulnerable to fire because they have dry edges and often adjoin cattle pastures, which are burned regularly. Global climate change could make Amazon forest fragments even more vulnerable to fire by exacerbating the periodic droughts, Laurance says. [Cheryl Dybas] Joint US-Russian Computer Agreement Will Greatly Enhance Scientific ComputingThe National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Russia's Kurchatov Institute have chosen an independent vendor to develop a high-performance computer network connection that will give the two nations' scientific communities unprecedented access to each other and facilitate joint scientific and educational projects. The link, called FASTnet (For Advanced Science and Technology Network), is funded in part by a $2 million NSF grant. Russian support for the link is from the Russian Ministry of Industry, Science and Technology. Teleglobe, a worldwide networking company, was chosen to develop the link. The 155 megabit-per-second FASTnet will increase the bandwidth between the U.S. and Russia by orders of magnitude and will facilitate communications through high quality video-conferencing that has never been possible on such a wide basis between the U.S. and Russian scientists. "FASTnet represents a new level of communication infrastructure between the U.S. and Russia and it introduces new possibilities for collaboration and cooperative work," said Dan Reed, director of NCSA and the National Computational Science Alliance. "The primary purpose of this network infrastructure is to enable scientists in both countries to explore new research opportunities in a variety of disciplines." Among those are joint responses to natural and man-made disasters, safeguards of nuclear material, better understanding of the human genome, joint exploration of space, distributed monitoring of seismic events, high energy physics collaborations and atmospheric and other environmental studies and simulations. [Tom Garritano] Mainframe Computer UnpluggedAfter more than 13 years, NSF's IBM mainframe computer -- the workhorse of NSF proposal, grant and financial processing - has been put out to pasture. It took three years to deploy new applications for the client-server/local area network that replaced the mainframe. Now all users and corporate application processes are off the IBM Mainframe. The official "retirement" occurred in late October 2001 when the mainframe was physically powered down. It was removed from the building in early December. "This transition is symbolic of ongoing changes at NSF," said Al Charity, the chief of NSF's infrastructure management branch. "When NSF initiated FastLane in 1995, we set the standard for federal agencies to conduct electronic business with their customers. But good customer service calls for constant monitoring and improvement of the [Information Technology] architecture and business processes. This upgrade is part of both. The move off the IBM Mainframe positions our IT architecture to take advantage of emerging technologies and to pursue goals identified within our five-year IT Plan." [Mary Hanson]
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